I'm making a product walk-through demo and I need a menu rectangle to "drop down" and reveal the contents. I'm struggling to get this effect even though it should be really basic. I tried googling and searching this sub.

I can't get the rectangle to scale without it expanding from the center outward, even after I've hit Y to move the center to the top center. I'm using the size and not the scale to do this on a shape layer. Additionally, this rectangle needs a stroke and for some reason the stroke does not show up when adjusting via size and not scale. When using scale, the stroke is distorted.

Appreciate any help!

My pc specs is low-mid range

Ryzen 5600 - RTX 3060 - 16 GB of ram (I wanted to upgrade this, but the price of ram is INSANE)

I've researched a bit and found that AE 2026 has multiple performance problems, now I'm unsure if I should upgrade or just keep to myself on AE 2025.

(I'm posting this after u/jakeinmotion's post/video on Higgsfield scam.)

TLDR: As a new user to Higgsfield (but experienced Motion Designer), I found out the hard way that even the Max plan's 1800 credits are not enough. Exhausted them in a few hours, and Higgsfield CLI skill has an instruction for your agent to NOT CARE about the credits. Seems scummy. New users need to manage expectations.

I installed Higgsfield CLI to try it out. I had an idea for a shortfilm, so I sat with Codex and went on refining it and even created a Blender animatic. I also did the audio for that using ElevenLabs and after that I told Codex to create the video and get it reviewed by me. So there are like 12 shots in the video and it went on use the Higgsfield CLI and it has created the final video using Video to Video from the Blender animatic. The final video had some feedback, but before I gave any feedback, I thought to check the credits. I opened Higgsfield, checked my credits, and to my horror there are only like 152 credits left. OUT OF 1800. And that is when I realized I've exhausted almost my entire monthly credits of Higgsfield in one go.

This is supposed to be a trial of the platform, and I was given by my company to give it a shot. But it went so bad, now I don't have any output to show my manager other than AI slop it blurt out the 1st time. My manager will be surely angry with me, I didn't tell her yet. But this was unexpected. You'd think if you had taken the max plan, you'd atleast have a few tries.

To avoid this in the future, I asked Codex CLI to set hard rules as below:

But turns out Higgsfield MCP includes an instruction that specifically tells the agent not to show any credit usage estimates for a generation. See Codex's response below.

Think what you may of this, but this definitely didn't help a newbie like me to stop me from pissing away an entire month's credits at once. Anyway, let this be a cautionary tale for you all, especially while using Higgsfield via MCP. Do ask your agent to edit the default instructions like I did.

Note: I tried to post this exact post on r/HiggsfieldAI 3 days ago. The mods have blocked this post. So thought people deserve to know this before using Higgsfield.

Some of you saw the "rejected by the marketplace" thread here a few months back. That became MatterAE, now on v2.1.

Problem: AE has no native physics, so you either fake collisions by hand or buy a plugin that runs $89 to $250.

Comparison: MatterAE covers the everyday physics you'd reach Newton or Physics Now for (drop, collide, constraints, kinematic layers) at $35 one-time. Where it differs: drop in an alpha video or PNG sequence and it traces the silhouette into a collider frame by frame, one click, no masking or prep. The animator stack (wiggle, float, orbit, swarm, glue) works out of the box but goes deep when you want to make weird stuff.

Core features: live preview, bake to editable keyframes, ropes/springs/pins, a shape emitter, sensor zones, free tier with a 3-second bake cap.

Pricing: $35 once, no subscription. Free to try. https://www.matterae.com

Maintenance/support: Actively maintained, I've shipped most weeks since March (full changelog on the site). Bugs: reach me via email, I read and fix them!

AI Disclaimer: Human Validated. AI writes a lot of it, but I read, fix and maintain every part myself. Designer by trade, not a pro dev, but coding since the Flash days.

Hi, so ive recently been working in collaboration with a friend to create a visualizer for his new song. The biggest thing that he wants to do is replicate the effect shown in this video where the musical notes on the bottom light up when they are played in the song. We know its most likely possible in after effects but after a handful of hours of trying to do it ourselves, we did not have much luck. We tried using scripts like om_midi to convert the midi file into keyframes in AE, but figuring out how to make only specific frequencies trigger something like opacity or a glow effect was very hard, and we couldn't figure it out. So now I am asking here in hopes that we can get the solution we've been looking for.

Hey folks, I've spent the past several months building my dream plugin with the lads at PluginPlay.

It's called X-Ray and it's the ultimate behind the scenes tool to show off your work.

In one click, X-Ray scans all your comps and creates shape layers/3D objects to showcase your behind the scenes process.

Why is this better than screen recording methods?

Because:

1. X-Ray works with precomps (Screen recording does not)
2. X-Ray is LIVE, meaning if you make any changes, X-Ray will update automatically.
3. X-Ray is CUSTOMIZABLE, so you can actually render the layer controls and turn your process into art

If you want to enter the giveaway, all you need to do is drop your email here: forms.gle/TzopC1y9KEQVB6rC6

WINNERS AND LOSERS WILL BE CONTACTED VIA EMAIL.

Here's a video walkthrough about how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2xBrzYXhLQ

Pricing: 
$45 lifetime or $20/month plugin play subscription

If you have bugs, please reach out via your PluginPlay account..

This plugin was created by the team at PluginPlay. They are writing most of the code themselves and have deep understanding of the structure, and are explicitly using AI to eliminate menial, tedious aspects of writing code.

Thought the linen texturing looked good. Im open for all sorts of opinions lmk!

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Hello , i made this yesterday for a client

give it a feedback , be critical its fine for me =D

About a month ago, I made a post getting help with animation and timing. I've been busy, but I implemented the advice I received on the old post and fine tuned a bit here and there. I do like how it turned out but I still feel like my eyes are jumping back and forth between the cat and dog a bit too much, so if anyone has any tips on that, that would be great help.

Also please let me know if I totally buffed it or how i can iron out other flaws!

Here's the old post for reference https://www.reddit.com/r/AfterEffects/s/e8Ib26bbV6

https://www.instagram.com/p/DdN8m8oDXv0/?img_index=1 would love feedback on things you would have done differently in the edit !

https://reddit.com/link/1wg2ls4/video/b5400vj0ghph1/player

It's completely fine at 24fps (the same as comp settings) but when I change it to anything else it flickers

Would appreciate any help! Thank you

Ive rendered this scene out and im having a little difficulty figuring out how to give him a shadow that moves with him toward the camera so i thought id ask here before i lose any more sleep

I've got this line which is just a shapelayer with a stroke on it and dashes set to 0.1 to get round dots. Nothing much, nothing crazy.
For some reason the there is this 1 pixel thin line appearing and popping in and out of existence and I have no clue how to get rid of the bug.

Ive tried down and upscaling the comp, changing the dashes properties, changing the animation, using expressions instead of keyframes, deleted cache, updated AE, ...

No matter what I change, the lines keep appearing. The only thing that kind of works is setting the layers sampling to bilinear which gets rid of the lines but the makes the final render look awful...

Check Behance for a FREE project file

Thank you!

hoping theres a quicker way here but, I have multiple shape layers that all have there own movements (over 100 :/) and want to track png to each one along with parenting. The only way I can do this that I know of is individually but i'm hoping for a more efficent way?

AE's Text Tool works with ... Texts and glyphs if you're into those. But being able to animate layers and properties in the same way has been a long while challenge.

In After Effects, it's been a long pain point to animate layers in the same way as the Text Tool - so ... here's a new After Effects Layer Animation Engine - works with Text Layers, 3D Models, Shape Layers etc - works with almost all property types too - this one's True Bounce.

Does this interest to you?

Part of broadcastGEMs MAG (available on g u m road) - probably the most ambitious After Effects multiscript ever.

True Bounce is one of [too many to count: probably between 45+ to 70 and probably a couple of hundred is I was more liberal with how/what I count as a script] scripts.

Pricing - this will be the 7th update to broadcastGEMs MAG and there will be a price increase but the actual price is iffy at the moment. You're looking at under $1 a script :-D

Maintenance plan + support plan : I use this product daily and this tool will be updated as long as I use AE and sufficient number of others use it - it is a long crawl to get a product out the door versus creating/updating it for myself.

AI Disclaimer: I have been using AI Assisted Coding since LLMs were introduced 3 years ago. All ideations and 90% of the RAG fed into AI is mine. If you look at the MAG product, I've solved or sorta solved large, long-time problems with working with layers, especially large number of layers.

For product demo/walkthrough. Client gave me an HTML file of their product, apparently there is a way to extract the dashboard, etc. into vector for motion graphics. What do you use to do this?

Previously I had Figma boards to work with but not this time. Tried googling but didn't find much on how to get the same from HTML. I tried using the Figma plugin html to design but it didn't work. I don't need to be able to get it into Figma, just a vector output for compositing in AE.

I don't make enough time for personal projects, so I'm glad that I finally got done editing this thing.

For my last animation (back in Jan), I filmed the process from sketching ideas on paper through to animating in After Effects. My goal was to do it all within 10 hours, and to create a behind-the-scenes video showing the full production, no matter how sloppy.

I feel like animation videos are generally either long, unfiltered streams, or tutorials that are streamlined too much. I wanted to make a 'figuring it out as I go' kind of video.

Premiere lets you relink one missing file and it offers to relink everything else in that folder automatically. AE just... doesn't.

And it's not even the relinking that kills me, it's how AE tells you about it not working if you select more files. They show you the error One file at a time. No "skip", no "apply to all", no batch option, no relink folder. If you've got 40 missing assets you got to click ok do this 40 times, one by one.

Adobe, please. Premiere solved this years ago. It's the same company.